On Trump and the Paris Agreement

A ride in the forest, even on a road bike, will make the world of difference

I was seriously considering writing a post this week about how a badly timed ‘nature break’ nearly deprived Tom Dumoulin of his Giro d’Italia win. I’m actually pretty tempted to come back to this, as it raises some interesting questions about cycling etiquette and how intestinal fortitude of the literal rather than figurative kind is an under-appreciated trait for a professional cyclist. But there was an announcement in Washington on Thursday that has put that into perspective, so I’ve set that aside for the moment.  

None of us should be particularly surprised by President Trump’s announcement that America would pull out of the Paris Climate Change Agreement. He said he would do it, and he did. For most people, it’s a shocking thing to have done.  Shocking, but not surprising.  But, rather like deliberately hitting yourself with a hammer, cutting out the element of surprise doesn’t cut out the element of shock.

So even though I wasn’t surprised, there’s a big part of me that really thought that he wouldn’t follow through with this.

I used to be a climate change negotiator, and was in the room (along with about 2000 other people) when the French president at the time,  François Hollande, announced that the Paris Climate Agreement was agreed. I’m a fairly sceptical sort of person, and on the political dynamics around international climate action I have to be careful that my scepticism doesn’t spill over into outright cynicism.  But the mood in the room that Saturday afternoon one of the most positive things I’ve ever experienced.  Over the four years or so that I did climate negotiations I’d gotten used to the annual round of UN climate talks wrapping with a mood of deflation and desperate disappointment.  But in 2015, there was cheering and clapping, and NGOs only just stopping themselves from dancing in the aisles.

I had a plane to catch, so didn’t stay right to the end, but being there in the room, when 196 countries agreed to collectively put their shoulders to the wheel in the way that suited them best and commit to climate action is something I’ll never forget.

Thursday’s announcement from the Rose Garden at the White House, that President Trump will follow-through on his campaign promise and withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement, is also something that will stick with us for a while.

Where does his decision leave us?

In an immediate practical sense, it doesn’t change much. The agreement itself doesn’t take effect until 2020, and the domestic policies and regulations that would underpin the US contribution to the collective global climate change effort were likewise not completely in place. Less for the Trump administration to take apart, then.

But, as almost everyone else in the world notes, it sends some deeply troubling signals about how the US leadership sees America’s place in the world. When Trump says “America First”, he means exactly that.

While a lot of Americans clearly find this sentiment reassuring, it’s hard for the rest of the world not to feel hard done by. American leadership has, for better or worse, more-or-less charted the course of the multilateralism and international cooperation that most countries need to get by in the world.  So Trump’s decision is sending some troubling shock-waves rippling through the multilateral system.  With decisions on US support to multilateral institutions like the UN and the Green Climate Fund looming, there’s no doubt more to come.

It’s hard to see the sliver lining in any of this but, less than a week after the announcement, the only positive I can see is this: Although Trump is pulling back from climate action, almost everyone else – citizens, governments, the private sector, even the big fossil-fuel energy companies – is putting their hand up and recommitting to climate action. So while he’s set things back a bit, we’re not stopped in our tracks. Not by a long shot.

For most of us it’ll be the small things that count, as it always does. Getting on the bus or train instead of taking the car. (And it wasn’t that long ago that depending on how and where you did it, taking the bus in some parts of America was a defiant act of civil disobedience.) Making conscious decisions about what and how we consume.  And yeah, getting on our bikes more.  I’ve already said we need a cycling revolution.  But that needs to be the start of something more.  A hearty “yeah, nah” to the idea that we’re happy to keep going the way we have been.

There’s a line that Winston Churchill is supposed to have said but which, like most things that seem too good to be true, he probably didn’t: “America always does the right thing, once it’s exhausted all other options”. The rest of us have to get on with things and have faith that America will, in the not too distant future, come to its senses and come and join the rest of the world.

On the Friday morning after Trump’s announcement I went for a ride. Nothing fancy; just a half-dozen reps up and down the closest thing to a hill as I’ve been able to find close to where we live.  It happens to be up and down Avenue du Président-Wilson. Woodrow Wilson was the 28th US President, and his famous Fourteen Points delivered to Congress in January 1918, with their focus on free trade, open agreements, democracy and self-determination, present as good a recipe for American leadership and internationalism as you’d find anywhere. It also turns out he was quite a keen cyclist.  So while America may have stepped down out of the saddle of international leadership and cooperation on climate change, we have to have faith that they’ll be back.  In the meantime, join the revolution and get on yer bike.

Have faith. Like this fella, they’ll be back in the saddle in no time. George Washington, on Avenue du President Wilson